Last updated: 05.07.04 Nadav_Carmel@Brown.edu

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This project was completed by Nadav Carmel in partial fulfillment of a Bachelor of Arts degree in Environmental Studies from the Center for Environmental Studies at Brown University. As such, this website will not be updated after May 2004. The data and methodology contained in this website are not part of a peer-reviewed scientific study.

Using historic Sanborn Fire Insurance maps and a geographic information system (GIS) methodology developed by the Boston Public Health Commission and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this project aimed to explore the landscape of risk along the Woonasquatucket River industrial corridor in Providence, RI, defining a link between historical land use and contemporary soil-bound contamination. The cumulative hazard map produced by the project is a qualitative reconstruction of the hazards posed by potential soil contamination along the River based on past industrial activity. Comparisons of the methodology's predictions to actual records of soil contamination within the limited study area have shown that its predictive capacity is relatively good for at least one broad class of soil contaminants.

The portion of the Woonasquatucket outside of Providence is comparatively pristine, but within Providence’s city limits until it empties into the Narragansett Bay, the River is neither fishable nor swimmable, and the neighborhoods through which it flows are some of the most impoverished and disenfranchised in the city. However, the River and its environs are the target of several ongoing redevelopment and remediation efforts. ESRI ArcView 3.2 GIS and Sanborn Fire Insurance maps from 1889 to 1956 were used to map the spatial patterns of industrial activity along the Woonasquatucket over time, in order to identify the geographic distribution of the potential for soil contamination.

The usefulness of the project is limited by the fact that it could not reach later than 1956, but due to the longevity of some industrial pollutants in the soil (e.g., heavy metals), it still retains its potential predictive power, however qualitative. For this reason, though, the methodology did not predict that the two known brownfields sites along the Woonasquatucket were likely to be contaminated, probably because either most of their contamination occurred later than 1956 or was not directly related to the industrial processes that took place on them. The methodology predicted contamination at several sites that did, in reality, turn out to have or once have had soil contamination of the general types predicted, but only one of these sites exhibited levels of heavy metals definitively above the known background levels of arsenic and lead Providence's soils. Hence, the methodology proved useful in predicting the presence of hydrophobic organic and soluble metal compounds, but not as useful in predicting the presence of heavy metals.